Animating Buttons In DVD Menu

[Vishad Dewan]

Does anyone know how to animate buttons in a DVD Menu created in DVD Studio Pro? I'd like the buttons to either fade in or move in on the screen after a few seconds. Could someone please tell me how to achieve this?

Thanks.

[Martin Pauly]

What you can do this is to create a short (30 to 60 seconds) video that contains the entire animation. I often use Motion to do this, but there are lots of other options (FCP, animation software, etc.). There are typically two phases in this video, (1) the setup where all the buttons "fly" into position, ad then (2) the continued background animation for the menu where the buttons stay in place.

Convert this video to MPEG-2 format and use it as the menu background. Then, in the menu inspector's "General" tab, set the loop point to the time in your video where phase (1) ends and phase (2) starts. This will prevent the intro to be shown again if the menu stays on the screen too long and the background video is repeated; the DVD player will then jump to the loop point instead of the beginning.

In DVD Studio Pro, instead of drawing the entire buttons, all you need to do is provide some highlighting for the graphics that is already part of your background image. I.e., instead of making the button say "Play", you'd just have an arrow or line or something that can highlight items from your background. With more sophistication you can probably integrate the background image and foreground buttons more, but I'd imagine it to be much more difficult if you want the result to look perfect.

An alternative to using the loop point is the use of menu transition clips, where phases (1) and (2) are kept in separate clips. See the section "Adding Intro and Transition Clips to Menus" in chapter 10 of the DVD Studio Pro manual for details on that.

Be prepared to spend a lot of time to make it look great - compared with using simple buttons from a template, at least.

Hope this helps!

- Martin